


Ever After

by justbygrace



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Canon verse, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-16
Updated: 2017-01-16
Packaged: 2018-09-17 20:58:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9344156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justbygrace/pseuds/justbygrace
Summary: A look at Rose Tyler's life





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of my favorites tbh and I can't believe it's taken me this long to return this to AO3.

Rose was five the first time she saw a film that ended with happily ever after. She sighed at the princess, envied the adventures, and gagged at the kiss, but it was the ride into the sunset that caught her attention, the ride away from the ordinary into a new and exciting life. She lay flat on her back on the couch and imagined someone prancing up on a beautiful horse to take her away. When she shared her thoughts with her mum she snorted and told her not to be foolish, real life wasn't like that. Looking around their tiny flat, Rose thought her mum was probably right, but the first seeds of hope had been planted.

Rose was sixteen the first time she thought she loved a boy, loved him enough to sneak out in the middle of the night with all of her belongings in her pack and a note on the kitchen table. They took a bus to the other end of town and it wasn't a beautiful horse, but it was good enough for her. At first it was exciting, an escape from everyday life, but reality hit quickly. Jimmy drank too much, gambled too much, flashed his temper too much, but she was determined to make her happily ever after and she kept her head down, got a job in the local shop, and looked the other way when he spent her money for quick shags on the corner. She pretended and daydreamed and ignored until the day his fist connected with the side of her jaw and reality came crashing down. Draining her bank account to pay off the collectors, she took the same bus back across town and endured her mum's tears and lectures and forced herself to stamp out the last vestiges of hope. 

Rose was nineteen the first time she dared to make a decision that was solely about what she wanted. A man grabbed her hand in the basement of a shop and she refused to let go, even when he dropped it while going on about the spin of the earth. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she heard a voice saying how this was just Jimmy all over again but she shut it out and kissed her boyfriend goodbye and raced into a wooden box which was so much more than a beautiful horse or a city bus. This man, this impossible man, this Doctor with a gruff voice and a battered heart pulled her to him to dance through the stars, holding her when it became too much for her and pushing her away when it became too much for him. Together they faced off against the stuff of nightmares and together they became the stuff of legends. With each new adventure and shared moment, she allowed herself to believe in hope once more.

Rose was twenty the first time she contemplated the meaning of ever after. She watched the man she loved, the one she thought she knew, become a different person in a burst of golden light. They had to figure out how to dance again, loving and arguing and laughing across time and space. She learned to love him despite, or maybe because of, idiosyncrasies and manic energy and French ladies and half-explanations and unfinished sentences. This time when he tried to push her away, she held on, refusing to let go of his hand, and when he asked about her plans for the future she told him they included him and he almost looked like he believed her. Somewhere between a bitchy trampoline and a bratty child-alien, she allowed herself to cultivate hope, letting it settle in and put down roots.

Rose was twenty-one the first time she tasted despair. One moment she was standing next to her Doctor determined not to leave him, the next she was standing in a parallel universe; one moment she was clinging to a lever saving the world one more time, the next she was flat against a wall with the echo of his scream in her mind. She couldn't breathe, couldn't eat, couldn't sleep; she was aware of people, voices, actions occurring around her, but none of it made sense. When she heard his voice calling, she followed it to a windy beach where they talked and teased and laughed and cried and ran out of time and she allowed the numbness to become complete. She threw herself into her job with abandon, not caring about anything except drowning out the hope, locking it away where it couldn't touch her, couldn't hurt her.

Rose was twenty-five the first time she learned that happily ever after never looks the same way in real life as it does in films. She was standing on a beach caught between the man she loved and the man who loved her and inexplicably there were two of them and they wanted the same thing, but only one of them was offering it to her and so she kissed him while the other walked away. She stood watching one disappear forever while the other held her hand, filling in the empty space around her and she studied him, trying to catalogue the differences, trying to find the similarities. They didn't say anything, either of them, content to let the words of others flow over and around them, responding with nods or smiles or shrugs. They refused to let go of each other until they entered her flat and there was no one but the two of them for the first time in four years. He looked at her and she looked at him, hands clutched so tightly they were losing circulation, and she spoke first, determined to be the one who got the promise this time, "How long you gonna stay with me?" He smiled, a gentle, loving, beautiful thing she once thought she'd never see again, and with one word he bracketed their existence. "Forever." And the long-buried seeds of hope started to blossom.


End file.
